As a typical wireless network system, a wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11) system depicted in FIG. 11 or a cellular (3GPP) system depicted in FIG. 12 is known, in which a situation of a real-time type streaming service being utilized through such a wireless network has recently increased.
In a multi-media service, especially a video service, by taking account of a load to a network for the distribution thereof over the Internet or the like and enormous amounts of video data pressing a storage area, a video file is compression encoded as needed in order to avoid them. This is represented by e.g. MPEG1 and 2.
Also, H.263 for 3G mobile phone encoding and H.264 for changing a compression rate in a wideband from QCIF level to HD level have been proposed as a new encoding method, unified with AVC that is MPEG-4 part 10 and standardized as H.264/AVC.
As streaming data, there exist the ones allowing temporary buffering like on-demand video program distribution besides the ones requiring a real-time reproduction like a live telecast or a video teleconference. Namely, there exist streaming data reproduced after having been buffered to some extent with respect to a reproduction timing on a timeline and streaming data not necessarily forced to carry all data transmitted from a media server to a receiving device upon the reproduction like a TV program.
It is to be noted that, as a reference, there is a simultaneous report communication system and method performing feedback of the statistical information, in which each relay node is provided with an information input means obtaining information reception status data delivered from receiving terminals connected or a subsidiary relay node to an up line, a statistical processing means generating statistical information of the receiving status of the receiving terminals connected by counting receiving status data according to the predetermined rules and a statistical information output means periodically delivering statistical information generated to an upper relay node or a transmitting device (see e.g. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2001-345807).
Also, as another reference, there is a streaming communication system and a stream transfer control method adjusting transfer data amount to reach a specified transmission rate, in which a QoS control portion in a reception node calculates QoS parameters respectively representing transmission rates allowing a real-time transfer in a transmission node and a relay node based on a data receiving performance and a data processing performance notified by the relay node and the reception node itself as well as the current transmission rate to require a setting change to the corresponding parameters; the transmission node and the relay node, after having sent a message temporarily aborting a QoS control to the transmission node, reduce stepwise a transmission allowable priority while increasing stepwise a transmission allowable block number of data block of the same priority as the priority in the same cycle to transmit or discard each data block (see e.g. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 11-341063).